Information technology has the broad aim of providing anytime-anywhere communication and computation. There are four key aspects considered for reaching the goal: communication, computation, storage, and security. The recent growth of distributed systems has necessitated design of techniques that consider some of these issues jointly, rather than each in an isolated manner.
Distributed systems typically are realized in one of two different scenarios: point-to-point and point-to-multipoint. For these systems, gossip based protocols are a very robust. In gossip based protocols, nodes can communicate with only one of its neighbors at a time. The communicating neighbor is typically chosen at random. In gossip-based communication, there is no centralized controller and every node in the network acts simply based on state or information of the node, and not that of the over all network. Thus, gossip based protocols are inherently distributed and readily implementable.